No politician or MSM journalist can dare question Israel's version of the story. How did we get to this? Where a brutal attack on 1.5 million people in an open air concentration camp leaves children starving for days cowered next to their mothers' dead bodies as Israeli soldiers looked on and prevented medical aid from getting to them (this was reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-01-08-red-cross-says-israel-broke-law-in-gaza). How is it that horrendous war crimes and the murder of hundreds of children are dismissed and accepted by many as simply a necessary part of the "war on terror"?

Not surprisingly, none of the MSM outlets reported on the UN human rights chief accusing Israel of war crimes! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/un-human-rights-gaza-zeitoun

I guess Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights and a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, must be an anti-semite!

What other explanation could there be for the almost unanimous level of support for a war that so far has killed and maimed thousands of Palestinian children, including some seeking refuge in UN schools? All this using US weapons, paid for by US taxpayers! How can Congress accept Israel's self-defense claim when it destroys an entire city in response to home-made rockets that killed 20 people over the past 8 years!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA

Israel has killed and maimed thousands of children in the past 15 days. Its soldiers have, for days, prevented the red cross from reaching starving children who were found cowered next to their mothers' dead bodies, as reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It has bombed refugees who sought protection in UN schools killing entire families. Yet these war crimes are marketed - and accepted by our illustrious leaders - as self defense (as a response to primitive rockets that killed 20 Israelis over the past 8 years)!

Israel is hardly being held to a "higher standard". In fact, holding Israel to basic international humanitarian law would involve its political and military leaders facing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

You try to justify Israel's being "tough" (as if killing and maiming thousands of civilians is just being "tough") on the grounds that poor Israel had to face many wars. Well that's what happens when you bring a bunch of eastern European Jews to a Middle Eastern land where Jews had been a tiny minority for 2 thousand years and have them ethnically cleanse the place to create a Jewish state (and then continue to ethnically cleanse it with no end in sight to keep the state Jewish)!

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

- David Ben Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel

I understand your emotional attachment to Israel but do you really want to support a state that was built on the ethnic cleansing of another people and that finds it so easy to justify the killing so many defenseless civilians?

how this is not primarily a war on the imprisoned, starved and blockaded people of Gaza. Keep in mind that politicians in Israel talk openly about how to pressure the civilian population of Gaza to achieve Israel's political goals (fyi- this is known by the rest of the world as collective punishment and is a war crime).

The world has reeled in horror at revelations of Israeli atrocities as the Palestinian death toll has climbed toward 800. The International Red Cross was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.

Israel's shelling of a UN school that had been turned into a refugee centre near Gaza city, killing 42 people who had fled the fighting, drew further accusations of indifference to civilian lives. And Israel has struggled to justify the eradication of entire families, including small children, in pursuit of Hamas officials.

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/11/gaza-israel-political-attitudes

I would add to Israel's motivation its well known policy of collective punishment. Their depraved political leaders have more than once declared that they want to punish the Palestinian civilian population, by causing further hardship. This was the "rationale" behind the 2-year hermetic siege which starved the 1.5 million people of Gaza prior to the latest onslaught.

The U.N. Human Rights Council's 47 members voted 33 in favor and 1 against a resolution saying the Israeli offensive has "resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people and systematic destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure."

- http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/12/news/UN-UN-Gaza-Rights.php

For those defending Israel's brutal attacks on the civilians in Gaza, have you no shame?

Hopefully Obama will put a stop to Israel's war crimes in Gaza and provide some accountability.

The U.N. Human Rights Council's 47 members voted 33 in favor and 1 against a resolution saying the Israeli offensive has "resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people and systematic destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure."

- http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/12/news/UN-UN-Gaza-Rights.php